Modern healthcare, particularly in hospitals, clinics and other healthcare institutions, has improved and benefited significantly from the development and use of medical infusion pumps to enhance patient care. For example, parenteral infusion directly into the patient and, in particular, intravenous infusion directly into the patient's circulatory system, can be advantageous. Therapeutic fluids, drugs, medications, pharmacological fluids, hydrating fluids, sucrose fluids, nutrient fluids, or other therapeutic fluids can generally be infused using disposable cassette pumps and peristaltic pumps. Syringe pumps can also be used in some instances. Particularly, it is advantageous to provide different kinds of controlled infusion including rate controlled infusion, periodic infusion, and bolus dosage infusion, all depending upon the medication, the patient, the patient's condition and any of a number of other healthcare considerations.
In institutional healthcare facilities, such as major hospitals, large clinics and other institutional healthcare facilities, prescribed medications are prepared by a staff pharmacist or a team of pharmacists, according to a doctor's order. Detailed instructions for the administration of the drug shall be provided also according to the professional knowledge of the pharmacist with respect to pharmacological protocol for the medication or drugs involved. The medication is received by a nurse or a medical technician in an appropriate container prepared by the pharmacist to be delivered to the patient's room and accordingly administered to the patient. For purposes of accurate infusion, rather than merely using a timed drip-type infusion mechanism, infusion pumps are beneficially used. Based upon the prescribed medication, the protocol for administering the modern infusion therapeutic fluid may include carefully controlled infusion rates. Modern infusion pumps may be adjustably configured by the person administering the infusion to deliver the fluid according to the doctor's and/or pharmacist's instructions.
In order to facilitate management and accuracy of infused medication, various systems have been devised for purposes of providing certain drug information and/or patient information, either directly to the pump from the container of the medicinal fluid or to the pump from a central computer network to be interconnected with all infusion pumps throughout the medical institution or hospital. One such infusion fluid institutional management system provides an infusion pump having means for storing predetermined infusion data in a computer type memory. Such a prior system requires comparison of compatibilities of drugs, allergies of the patient, appropriate drug therapy, and patient conditions. This kind of complex comparison requires that a bar code label on the drug container is scanned and read into the computerized pumping system for automatically comparing the scanned clinical information to the data stored in memory for the infusion pump. The scanned and transferred data must be checked with the stored data for comparison and for prompting the operator to take action in response to discrepancies between the scanned data and the predetermined stored data. Although such a system provides certain measures of security to reduce certain kinds of manual entry errors through comparison of the bar code read data with a comprehensive data base of predetermined information in a large computer memory, it nevertheless includes certain complexities and fails to assure certain safeguards that might be accomplished without a central processor network and without a computer memory for storing comparison infusion data for numerous different drugs. There is a need for an optional system for scanned entry of basic infusion data having human accountability built in and without the associated complexity of prior systems.